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TEACHINGS | EASTERN HORIZON 15

Usually when we ask these questions, we answer no. We
are not really under attack, and there really is enough to
go around. What’s bothering us is probably more a matter
of pride and habitual defensiveness than reasonable
necessity. When we reflect further, we notice that the
consequences of this habitual response are not good:
we end up with words, deeds, and feelings that cause us
trouble and mess and that compromise our health, state
of mind, and relationships. If we investigate and intervene
like this again and again, we will eventually see our small-
mindedness for what it is: an unsuccessful habit based on
inaccurate information—a bad attitude.
Doing this consistently takes mental discipline. It is a
kind of emotional yoga. But when you are motivated
and determined, you can do it, especially if you have the
support of your meditation practice and a community of
friends to help you.

In fact, meditation practice is the best way I know to
We study our minds by noticing in detail whenever
cultivate the expansive attitude of generosity. It is, of
we feel pinched, small, fearful, or stingy; whenever we
course, possible to sit down in meditation crabbed into
find ourselves seeing the glass half-empty rather than
yourself, obsessed with your thoughts, worries, and the
half-full, or clenching up with defensive and protective
constrictions of your situation. To practice the perfection
feelings. We learn to identify these feelings in our bodies
of generosity in meditation is the opposite of this. When
and minds—noticing the tightness in our chests and
you practice the perfection of generosity in meditation,
breathing, the clenching in our shoulders and faces, the
you open up, your fear and anxiety soften and dissolve,
old familiar paranoid and panicky trains of thought.
and you sit in the middle of the great gift of limitless,
imaginative life.
With lots of patient repetition and training, eventually
we learn how to notice these things before they run away
Settling down and paying attention to body and breath
with us. We learn to catch ourselves in midstream and
will absorb the free-floating anxiety that is usually there
just, literally, stop. If we are walking, we stop walking. If
in your mind, without your knowing it. This enables you
we are sitting, we stand up. We take a conscious breath
to relax and let go into that generous spaciousness. Sit
or two and ask ourselves, “Is this really true? Am I really
in the midst of it. You can say to yourself, “This is life:
under attack? Is there really not enough to go around?”
body, breath, consciousness. I share it with everyone and
And we ask further, “What are the effects of this habit of
everything. It holds and protects me.”
mind?” This process and these questions are practices.
We take them up repeatedly. We work at them.
Be willing to keep sitting like this every day, and bit by
bit you will be able to see some daylight in your basic
When you practice the perfection of generosity in attitude that wasn’t there before—patches of blue. EH
meditation, you open up.